2
The next day’s journey passed just as uneventfully. No monsters. No attacks. The most memorable moment came when they crested a hill, and Freud stopped dead, saying, “Ah. I remember this area. To more accurately retrace my route, we must now adjust our course slightly to the northwest.”
The land in that direction sloped generally downward and consisted mostly of meadows thick with wildflowers. The meadows ended about four miles away in a line of trees that blocked the view beyond.
Maggie grabbed Adam’s arm. “Look!” she said, her voice high and excited.
He followed her pointing finger and saw a cluster of mountains far to the north, their crisp snow-white crowns contrasting sharply with the hazy, purple-gray slopes beneath them.
“Mountains,” he said with a wistful smile.
“The first we’ve seen since the Cataclysm,” Maggie said. “They remind me of home. Of the Alps.”
Adam nodded. “Perhaps when our quest is done, we can visit those peaks and compare them with the ones we knew so long ago.”
“I would like that.” She turned to the others. “The rest of you are welcome to come, as well.” As she spoke, she looked mainly at Bob.
“That’d be nice,” he said with a smile.
Kukalukl yawned.
They reached the trees when the sun was low and red in the west. The view from the hill had been deceptive, for what had appeared to be a thin line of trees from so far away was in reality much thicker, more like a ribbon of forest.
On the edge of the trees sat a low wooden building with no windows and a single five-foot-high door that slid open on a wooden track. The building’s small dimensions led Maggie to wonder if it had been built for children, but Kukalukl asserted the place was clearly of gnomish design. Inside was a long hallway with two dozen doorless stalls opening off it. At the far end of the hallway a broken stool lay on its side. Fourteen crude circles the size of pennies had been scratched into the floor of one of the stalls. Otherwise the place was bare, anonymous.
“I’ve run into gnomes a few times in my travels,” Kukalukl said. “This, I believe, is what they call a boko zafendo, a sort of prison.”
“‘Sort of’?” Bob asked.
Kukalukl glanced at Dagmar, who was ten feet away inspecting the sliding door. In a voice too low for her to hear, he said, “They tortured prisoners in these places. Boko zafendo literally translates as ‘corridor of screams.’ They’re usually built in remote areas, far from civilization. Out of sight, out of mind, I suppose.”
“Doesn’t look too nasty.”
“Gnomes tend to be meticulously clean. That doesn’t hide all traces, though. Be glad you don’t have my keen sense of smell; while it’s clear this place hasn’t been used in years, it still reeks like a slaughterhouse.”
While the others made camp at the edge of the trees a hundred feet north of the boko zafendo, Bob scouted ahead to see what lay within and beyond the strip of forest.
He was gone so long that when he returned the others had already started eating, except for Kukalukl who was still out hunting his own dinner.
“We were growing worried,” said Maggie. She was trying to sound casual, but the relief in her eyes was clear to anyone who cared to look. “What kept you?”
“Actually, there was a lot to check out on the other side of the trees.”
“Nothing serious, I hope,” said Adam.
Bob shrugged as he piled some pork on a plate. “Hard to say. The terrain over there is totally different from anything we’ve encountered so far. It’s gonna be tough going. And slow.”
“What is it like?”
“Basically, it’s bare stony ground that’s full of pits and fissures, with boulders and smaller rocks strewn all over the place. It’s like a giant rocky obstacle course that stretches on and on for miles. Beyond it I think there’re more trees, but it was too far away and it was getting too dark to tell for sure.”
“Ah, yes,” said Freud. “I recall that area quite well. It was difficult to navigate.”
“Do you recall seeing any potentially hostile life-forms?” Adam asked.
“I do not recall seeing any life-forms at all, aside from a few birds. Though the rocky area is perhaps only three miles wide, it took me nine hours and twenty-six minutes to cross it, for I was continually forced to backtrack in order to seek out new, more accessible paths.”
“Should we just go around it, then?”
“Certainly not. For one thing, it extends quite a long distance to the north and south, meaning that even if we possessed no map of the terrain, it would take us far longer to go around it than to cross it. But we do have a map of a sort, for the route I took is saved in my memory. Thus, if I can locate the spot where I exited the maze it will be a simple matter to retrace my steps. Doing so will, in my estimation, enable us to cross this rocky wasteland in only four hours or so.”
“Good,” Bob said. He sat down near Maggie—close enough to qualify as sitting beside her, but not so close as to appear unseemly—and started to eat. Maggie glanced at him, then returned to her food with a small smile.
Adam watched them with amusement. He wondered if the members of their odd little band would choose to remain together after the quest was done. It was looking more and more likely that he and Maggie and Bob and—assuming all went well—Anna would do so; but what of Dagmar and Kukalukl and Freud? Perhaps all seven of them could become a team not unlike Bob’s League of Super-Heroes and travel about this wild world, helping the powerless fight off the monsters that would prey on them…
He s had an image of himself clad in a skin-tight costume similar to Bob’s, a blue cowl pulled over his wrinkled face, yellow gloves encasing his huge hands, a stylized F emblazoned on his chest, a cape flapping behind him in the breeze.
No. Absolutely not. They could form a team, they could right wrongs, they could battle evil, they could even call themselves the All-New League of Super-Heroes; but not all the torments of hell could get him to wear such garish apparel.
Besides, what made him think such a scheme would work? People would reject his help no matter how benevolent his intentions, seeing him as just another monster. He knew that. Why, then, was he pretending he could be a hero? What was the use in daydreaming about being something he could never be?
With a small sigh, he returned to his food.
Dinner passed in near silence. The only sounds were chewing and smacking and the crackle of the fire.
When Bob finished eating, he looked around and saw that Dagmar had eaten only a few bites of her food. She was staring down at the plate in her lap and aimlessly moving a strip of pork around with her fork.
“You okay?” he asked.
She didn’t respond.
He leaned toward her. “Are you all right?”
Still no answer.
Worried, he laid a hand on her arm. “Do you—”
She shot to her feet so hard and fast her plate flipped over three times and landed in the fire. The pork vanished into the high grass. She glared at Bob, hands clenched into fists, eyes blazing with a volatile mix of fear and fury, chin dimpled and trembling as if she were about to burst into tears.
“Don’t touch me!” she screamed. “Don’t do anything unless I say so! I’m the queen here. Me. This is my kingdom, and I’m in charge of everyone here. Which means I’m your queen, and the stuffed animals’ queen, and the Marauders’ queen, and everyone’s queen, so everyone had better do what I say or I’ll have you fucking killed!” By the end of this speech, her voice had risen to a shriek, her whole body was quaking with rage, and tears were streaming down her cheeks.
For a long moment, everyone just stared at her. Then Bob offered her the sweetest, most disarming smile he could manage (and he could manage it quite well), got down on one knee as if he were being knighted, bowed his head, and said, “I apologize for any unthinking insult on my part, fairest queen.”
Dagmar’s tears continued streaming unabated and her quaking grew more in
tense, which led everyone to think she was about to suffer a total psychological meltdown. But then she glanced about at everyone with alarm, as when someone who has been talking to herself suddenly remembers she’s in the presence of others, and what she did next shocked everyone: She unballed her hands, took a breath so deep it seemed her lungs must burst, tilted her chin up like a great sage about to deliver a wise and weighty proclamation, and said, “No, I apologize for my outburst. It was…childish. It will not happen again.”
Everyone gaped at her. Maggie felt a shiver run up her spine. For the first time since meeting Dagmar, she felt—really felt—that she was in the presence of genuine royalty.
The bushes at the edge of the clearing rustled and Kukalukl appeared, the front half of a giant squirrel in his jaws. A loop of blood-streaked intestine dangled from its gaping trunk like a slick, slimy noose. He set the half-squirrel on the grass and eyed Dagmar, whose back was to him, then the others, his yellow‑green eyes glinting in the firelight.
“Is anything wrong?” he said. A hint of a growl rumbled in the back of his throat as he spoke.
“No,” said Dagmar without turning. “Everything is fine. Your concern is appreciated but unnecessary.”
Kukalukl gazed at her back for a moment, then said, “Hm,” as if he had been given something interesting to ponder. Then he flopped to the grass and started devouring the squirrel.
“I would like some more pork,” said Dagmar, “if there is any left.”
“There is,” said Maggie.
She dished up a fresh plate of food and handed it to Dagmar, who gulped it down as if she hadn’t eaten in a week. Everyone watched her out of the corners of their eyes, not daring to look at her directly and run the risk of making her feel like a sideshow freak and thus upset her all over again.
When she finished the pork, she ran her finger all around the plate to catch any crumbs and bits of salt, then stuck the finger in her mouth and licked it clean. She set the plate aside, leaned back against her backpack, and looked contentedly at the others, all of whom pretended they hadn’t been watching her the whole time.
Kukalukl, having likewise finished his dinner, padded over and lay down in the grass next to her.
“Again, I apologize,” Dagmar said. “I’m still trying to deal with everything that’s happened—those awful animals, what happened to my parents, being made a…a vagabond in what’s left of my kingdom. But it’s still no excuse for such a tantrum.”
“You have not spoken much of your kingdom,” Maggie said. “What was it like?”
Dagmar blinked at her for a moment as if she didn’t understand the question. Then her forehead crumpled into a small frown.
“I…I don’t know what it was really like. I knew it only as beautiful ruins. It was called Eridia. My parents—King Stevan and Queen Zara—they told me that the royal lands once stretched for over three hundred miles in every direction and had forests full of towering old trees and fat, slow animals perfect for hunting. There were crystal-clear streams with so many fish in them it was said you could walk across the water on their backs. Once in a while you even saw a unicorn or a fairy in the forest, though they’d always vanish if you got too close.
“Tiny villages dotted the land, and the villagers were happy, well-fed folk who grew their crops and paid their taxes and did whatever else villagers do. My father’s mighty army kept them safe from monsters and evil men, so they never dreamed of complaining or revolting because they knew they could never protect themselves half as well as he and his army could.
“The royal palace was so huge even the servants sometimes got lost in it. Everywhere you turned there were marble pillars and curving white staircases and fireplaces big enough to fit a wagon inside. It had over two hundred rooms and five towers and a moat.
“Behind the palace was a gigantic garden with a maze made of hedges, and statues carved by the best sculptors in the kingdom, and gazebos with golden roofs, and fountains designed so the falling water sounded like flutes and harps.
“Next to the garden were the stables where we kept the royal horses, which were strong as oxes, pretty as kittens, and fast as hawks. My father and mother would go out hunting on them every weekend, and they’d always come back with deer or elk or buffaloes.
“And that’s how it was, and how it had been for many hundreds of years, because my father was only the latest in a long, long line of kings that stretched back as far as anybody could remember. Portraits of the earlier kings filled the longest hallway in the palace, and that didn’t even include the earliest kings who didn’t have their portraits painted.
“But then came the Cataclysm, and it all got swept away. Earthquakes knocked down half the palace; floods wiped out some villages; other villages just vanished and in their place were monsters and weird buildings and all kinds of other things.
“By the time I was born a few years later, the only people left in the palace were my parents and a single servant—a fat old maid named Nanette. Everyone else was either dead or they’d run away. Nanette usually watched over me since my parents were away a lot, trying to drive the monsters from their land.”
“Just the two of them?” Maggie asked in surprise.
“Oh, it wasn’t a big deal. They were both great warriors. They battled orcs, trolls, zombies, even a huge black dragon named Klax, and they won every battle. Which isn’t to say things never went badly for them on their monster hunts. Once when I was six, they didn’t come back by nightfall like they normally did. Nanette and I waited and waited, listening at the window for the hoofbeats of my parents’ horses coming up the path, and eventually it got really late, later than I’d ever been up before, and they still weren’t back. I was so worried I couldn’t stop crying. Nanette kept telling me to hush up and that they’d be back soon enough, they’d just had a little trouble, nothing they hadn’t dealt with before. But I didn’t believe it, and I could tell she didn’t believe it either. We both thought they were dead or badly injured, but neither of us wanted to say so because saying it out loud would somehow make it more real.
“A little after dawn the next morning they staggered into the ruins of the palace, exhausted and hungry and looking like they’d been dragged the length of the forest. Their clothes were dirty and torn, and their hair was all wild and knotted, and they were covered head to toe with bruises and scratches.
“When Nanette asked them what happened, my father’s eyes got all sad and distant and he said, ‘The horses are dead. They were killed by a monster made of clay. We destroyed the monster, but…’ And then he just shrugged and he and my mother headed off to their rooms.
“I cried like crazy. I loved those horses. Knowing I’d never see them again made me bawl so hard for so long that Nanette got mad and yelled that I should just shut my mouth and be thankful that my parents got back okay.
“I shut up. It was more because Nanette got mad than because of what she said. I’d never seen her so furious, with her face bright red and spit on her lips. I realized later that the whole thing had shaken her up too; that was why she acted like that.
“Nanette died when I was seven, and that stunned me even more than the deaths of the horses. She’d been around all my life. I couldn’t imagine things without her. Neither could my parents, and they were so grateful for all she’d done that when we buried her my father read ‘The Greatest Never Fall,’ a funeral sermon that had been reserved for only the bravest knights of Eridia.
“Since Nanette wasn’t around to look after me anymore, my parents didn’t go out monster hunting very much after that. But that was okay, because monsters and bandits had pretty much stopped coming through our lands. I guess my parents’ years of patrolling had done the job, and the bad guys were scared of entering Eridia…”
Dagmar’s face darkened, and her shoulders slumped under the burden of sudden, unwelcome memories.
“Except the Marauders,” she said in a toneless voice. “They showed up about a month ago. My parents tried to
fight them off, but there were too many of them. My dad managed to take down three of them before they got him, but…”
“Three?” Adam said. “Even with my inhuman strength and speed, I slew only a pair of them in Sweetwater. You father must have been a great warrior indeed.”
“Yeah. He was. They both were. They…” She lowered her head and took a deep shaky breath.
“It’s okay,” Bob said. “You don’t need to tell us any more.”
She looked up, eyes wet with unshed tears but also bright and intense with conviction. “No, I should. I have to.”
“What? But—”
“I know stuff. Don’t you see? They took me prisoner. I mean, I escaped after a day, but I was in their camp. I watched them. I heard what they said. I know more about them than any of you.” She paused, considered, then looked at Kukalukl. “Well, except you.”
“Yes,” the jaguar said. “I can tell them, if you prefer.”
She shook her head. “I think this is something I need to do.”
“It would provide catharsis,” Freud said.
“Cuh-what?”
“He means that talking about it’ll help get rid of some of the pain you’ve got bottled up,” Bob said.
“Actually,” Freud said, “to be strictly accurate—”
“Isn’t necessary. Now pipe down.” He motioned for Dagmar to talk.
She looked at them, her expression scared and uncertain, as if they were a jury about to render a verdict on her. Seemingly unconsciously, she laid a hand on Kukalukl’s head and stroked his fur. He started purring.
She took a deep breath and said, “After they killed my parents, they threw me into one of their big wheeled cage‑things. I don’t know if you’ve seem ‘em, but they’re like horse-drawn cages with a section attached for a driver to sit on.”
Maggie nodded. “They employed such vehicles when they attacked Sweetwater.”
“Yeah, so anyway, we traveled all day. I think we were heading west, but I didn’t really pay all that much attention. I was pretty out of it. The road was really bumpy and the only thing to sit on was the floor of the cage, which was just bare metal, so by the time we stopped that evening I felt like one big bruise.
“The Marauders made camp in a meadow with a little stream at one end. They parked all the cages in a line near the stream, and mine ended up right next to the only other cage with something in it. That something was a big black lump. It looked like some kind of animal, but its fur was caked with so much dried blood, I doubted it was even alive.
“Anyway, while the Marauders cooked and ate their dinner, which was mostly just meat and ale, I listened to their talk, and I learned stuff about them. I mean, it’s not a lot. It might not help much, but…” She shrugged.
“Just tell us whatever you can,” Maggie said.
“Well, they talked a little bit about their base. They’ve got lots of horses and machines of some sort there, and it sounds like it’s really big—much bigger than they actually need—like maybe an old factory or something.”
Adam turned to Freud. “Did you see any buildings of that sort on your way east?”
“No,” Freud said. “At least not in the area in question. But the area is so heavily forested that I could have passed within a couple hundred feet of a large building without noticing.”
“How many Marauders were in the group who captured you?” Maggie asked Dagmar.
Dagmar frowned in concentration as she counted with her fingers, the count slowing down the farther it progressed. When she reached a dozen, the count paused for a long time. She lowered her hands.
“Twelve, I think. But there had been fifteen, counting the three my dad killed.”
“Actually,” Kukalukl interjected, “there were originally sixteen. I slashed the throat of one when they captured me.”
“Ah,” Bob said with a nod. “I figured you had to be the blood-streaked lump.”
“Goodness, did you deduce that all by yourself?”
Bob opened his mouth to tell the jaguar not to be so needlessly rude, then realized it would be a waste of breath and just shook his head.
“Do you think you can describe the Marauders you saw?” Adam said to Dagmar. “Their names, their traits, what weapons they used, and so forth?”
“Um, I think so.” She hadn’t caught all their names but was able to describe them well enough to reveal that all but two had been among those who attacked Sweetwater, which gave Adam and the others hope that the gangs’ membership wasn’t as large as everyone believed. Perhaps it was only rumor-fed fear that made them seem so numerous.
“I learned some stuff about their leader too,” Dagmar said. “It’s someone they call M or Big M, and they’re all scared to death of the guy. In fact, at one point I heard Schweeliski and Skippy whispering near my cage. Schweeliski had done something with one of their female captives—some sex thing, I guess—and now he was scared out of his wits the boss would find out, because they’re not allowed to do stuff like that without permission. Skippy told him that no one’d tell on him, but that he’d better make sure he never did it again. I don’t think it made Schweeliski feel any better. I mean, I could actually see his hands shaking as he walked off.
“Oh, and another thing I learned is the leader’s got an advisor everyone makes fun of because of some problem with tics or spasms or epilepsy or something. They kept calling him Twitchy.” She shrugged. “I guess this isn’t really too much help, is it?”
“Even the tiniest scraps of knowledge are invaluable,” Adam said. “When going into an unknown situation, the things that will prove to be important are likewise unknown.”
“I guess…” she said dubiously.
“So how did you manage to escape?” Maggie asked.
“Oh, that was easy. Well…it wasn’t exactly easy, but it was simple. I waited till everyone was asleep—and they were really deeply asleep; they’d all had so much ale you could probably get drunk just by sniffing ‘em—then I just squeezed out through the bars of the cage.”
Adam shook his head in disbelief. “If the cage in question was of the same construction as the ones we saw in Sweetwater, I am amazed that even one as diminutive as yourself could fit through those bars.”
She blinked at him for a second, then looked at Kukalukl.
“It means ‘little,’” he said.
“Oh! Well, yeah. Like I said, it wasn’t exactly easy. The worst part was getting my head through the bars. I mean, I could squeeze the rest of me through okay, but my head was just a teensy bit too wide to fit. I tried to force it through, but it hurt so bad I had to stop. It felt like my skull was gonna crack open.
“I was about to give up in despair when I had a brainstorm. They’d given me a bowl of meat for dinner, but even though I was starving I hardly ate any of it. I mean, I tried, but it just made me nauseous. It was all greasy, and it was so underdone it squirted blood the moment you touched it.
“But it turned out that was a good thing, because after sitting there for a while, the bottom of the bowl was a stew of blood and grease, and what I did—and I know this is disgusting, and I was literally gagging as I did it, but it worked—what I did was I smeared this gunk in the bowl all over my head so it’d be slippery enough to get through the bars. Even then, it almost wasn’t enough. My head stuck again. I had to pull and pull, and it hurt so much I nearly started screaming. But just then—pop!—I was through.”
“It was really quite an impressive display of moxie,” Kukalukl said. “I watched the whole thing.”
“Yeah, I didn’t even realize he’d gotten up until I turned to go and saw the biggest cat I’d ever seen standing there in the next cage over, watching me. I nearly yelped out loud, I was so surprised.
“I was even more surprised when he whispered, ‘Hello there, young human. My name is Kukalukl. It’s nice to meet you.’ I just gawked at him. I mean, I’d never met a talking animal before.”
“‘Talking animal’?” Kukalukl said.
“I’m a god.”
“Well, yeah, but I didn’t know that then.” To the others, she said: “Anyway, he asked me if I’d be so kind as to let him out of the cage. He was very polite and well-spoken and everything, but I didn’t think letting him out would be such a good idea because he was, you know, a big meat-eating cat. And I told him that. I asked him, ‘How do I know you won’t just eat me if I let you out?’ That was when he told me he was a god and that if I helped him he’d be in my debt. He swore on his own name he wouldn’t hurt me in any way and promised he’d help me and protect me for the rest of my life. He told me that whatever happened, he would always stand by me.”
“Wow,” Bob said. “That’s a pretty nice deal.”
“Yeah, well, it sounded good, but for all I knew he might have been a big liar or something. On the other hand, if he wasn’t, I couldn’t just leave him there to be tortured.
“I guess it was pretty obvious I wasn’t sure what to do, because after a few seconds, he suggested I just go get the key and toss it into the cage, and he’d let himself out.”
“With no opposable thumbs?” Bob asked Kukalukl.
“It can be done,” the jaguar said, “given enough time and ingenuity.”
“I thought it over and decided it was a good compromise,” Dagmar said. “That way, while he was trying to unlock the cage, I could just run as fast as I could and hopefully be far away by the time he was done.
“I went and got the key—they kept the key to each cage in a leather pouch on a hook above the driver’s seat—and came back, being real careful not to make any noise. I mean, all the Marauders were dead asleep, and some of them were snoring loud enough to shatter stone, but I didn’t want to take any chances.
“When I got back to the cage door, I stopped and stared at him through the bars for a moment. And then…” She fell silent and gazed off at the pale shape of the boko zafendo in the distance.
“I don’t know exactly why I did it,” she said in a low, musing voice. “I mean, I guess I figured that if he was telling the truth then that’d be fantastic. And if he wasn’t…well, I didn’t really have much left at that point, you know? My parents were dead. I was in the middle of nowhere with no place to go. I mean, I really had nothing to lose.
“So being real quiet, I unlocked the door and pushed it open. And then I looked at him in there and…well…”
“She ran away,” Kukalukl said. “Just turned and fled like a startled deer.”
Dagmar shrugged. “I got scared all of a sudden. I mean, there weren’t any bars there any more between me and this huge mass of claws and teeth and muscles. I don’t know. I guess it seems kind of babyish after everything else…”
“Not at all,” Maggie said. “I think you have proven yourself to be astonishingly brave for one so young.”
“Thanks.”
“So, what, did you follow her?” Bob asked Kukalukl.
“Of course. But only after I gathered a few items of human food from the Marauders’ camp since I assumed (correctly) that she didn’t know much about foraging for herself.
“Tracking her down was a simple matter. Though she tried to mask her trail by entering the stream and wading along it for over a mile—a display of cleverness rare in a mortal so young—the lingering stench of the putrid meat-drippings she’d smeared all over her head made her trail impossible to miss.”
“And I’d even tried to rinse it off in the stream,” Dagmar said.
“Yes, well, with a scent as foul as that, you’d need nothing less than a thermonuclear device to eradicate it so quickly.
“At any rate, I finally found her huddling under the drooping boughs of a huge evergreen. She had traveled over three miles on foot in the middle of the night, leaving me unsure which to admire more: her courage or her endurance. It took me a while to figure out how best to reveal myself to her without sending her screaming for the far side of the world.”
Dagmar rolled her eyes. “Yeah, and his great idea was to call out, ‘Hello, young human. I brought you some food. And please rest assured, I have no intention of eating you.’”
“I thought it would suffice.”
“Well, I guess it wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but it was still really scary to hear that deep rumbly cat voice come out of the darkness like that. I didn’t answer right away; I guess I thought maybe he was trying to trick me into revealing myself or something. But then he started telling me what food he’d brought. There was bread and potatoes and some Beef Jerky and stuff. And that did the trick. I mean, yeah, I was scared and everything, but I was also starving. It felt like my stomach was trying to eat itself. Plus, I realized that he must know exactly where I was—if he couldn’t see me, he could certainly smell me—and if he’d really wanted to eat me, he would’ve done it already. Of course, even then, it crossed my mind he might be just toying with me, the way cats play with mice. But like I said, I was so hungry I had to take the chance.
“So I crawled out and…” She shrugged. “He wasn’t lying. There was a bag full of food, and I ate so much I thought my stomach would burst. And he didn’t try to eat me or anything. He was going to protect me and stand by me, like he’d said.” She ruffled the fur on Kukalukl’s head, eyes shining with sudden, irrepressible tears. “I wasn’t alone.” She lowered her head, embarrassed.
“That is lovely,” Maggie said.
Dagmar shrugged again without looking up.
“Not to be rude,” Freud said, “but how is it that a ‘god’ found himself in a Marauder cage in the first place?”
Kukalukl huffed. “I was wondering when that would come up. And I’m not at all surprised you would be the one to mention it. The sad fact is, being so brilliant and powerful, I sometimes get…lax. My vigilance wavers. Such was the case here. I’d been traveling through an overgrown region for most of the day—lots of vines and bushes and high weeds everywhere. A narrow path wound through it all, covered here and there by thick mats of old leaves. For a while I’d been detecting the scents of men and a couple of creatures I didn’t recognize, but since so few beings pose a threat to me, I saw no reason to be concerned.
“Alas, one of the mats of leaves had been quite artfully arranged to conceal a snare, which I stepped into. I later learned the Marauders had been hoping to trap some creature called the Serpicon—whatever that was—and caught me purely by accident. Ah, well. At least I had the satisfaction of killing one of the odious twits as they were trying to get me into the cage.”
“The battle must have been fierce, considering the extent your injuries,” Adam said.
“Injuries? Oh, you mean when Dagmar first saw me. Actually, the injuries I sustained during my capture were long gone. After all, three days had passed since then, and in that amount of time I can recuperate from practically anything. No, the wounds Dagmar described were born of the Marauders’ cretinous sadism. At first they were reluctant to harm me beyond what was necessary to get me into the cage, being under orders to capture ‘rare and remarkable beasts,’ preferably whole and unharmed.”
“What on earth for?” Maggie asked.
“I never found out. Perhaps their leader had plans for a petting zoo. At any rate, when they discovered that my injuries had healed overnight, they saw a new outlet for their cruelty and decided to conduct further ‘tests’ of my healing powers. And when those injuries, much worse than the first batch, healed nearly as quickly, they did it again the next night, this time ratcheting up the barbarism even more. They pierced me with spears, they burned me with torches, they threw knives at me to see who could get them to stick in my flesh. This time the damage was so severe that I was still healing the next afternoon, when they imprisoned Dagmar. You know the rest, and I am bored with talking.”
Bob shook his head. “So the two of you decided to go after the Marauders all by yourselves, huh?”
“Well, why not?” Dagmar asked in a defensive tone. “Somebody had to. And I certainly wasn’t gonna leave my parents unavenged, especially n
ow that I had a god on my side.”
Bob spread his hands, palms out. “Oh, hey, I’m not saying it was a bad idea or anything. Frankly I think it’s gutsy as heck. I doubt most people would even consider it.”
“Thanks,” she said, wriggling a little with satisfaction as if someone were scratching her back. “Anyway, it’s nothing to worry about now; with all of us together, we should be able to deal with the Marauders, no problem.”
Bob forced a smile. He glanced at Maggie and saw the same troubled look in her eyes that he was trying to mask in his own, a look born of the belief that Dagmar was being overly optimistic and that dealing with the Marauders would prove far more difficult than any of them could possibly imagine.
Chapter 7
The Badlands